Yale Finds Error in Legal Stylebook: Harvard Did Not Create It

Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.

“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”

Mr. Shapiro, a graduate of Harvard Law School, said he knew that his employer might take little pride in his discoveries. “The Bluebook is criticized more than it’s praised,” he said. “It is often criticized for being terribly complicated.”

“The vacuity and tendentiousness of so much legal reasoning are concealed by the awesome scrupulousness with which a set of intricate rules governing the form of citations is observed,” he wrote.

The standard account of the origins of The Bluebook is reflected in a 1987 speech by Erwin N. Griswold, who had been president of The Harvard Law Review, dean of Harvard Law School and solicitor general of the United States. The speech is reproduced on the law review’s website.

The Bluebook, he said, was based on a booklet prepared by Harvard students in the 1920s. “Other law reviews heard about it, and made suggestions for its improvement,” he said. “This led to a meeting of the presidents of the Harvard, Columbia and University of Pennsylvania Law Reviews, and The Yale Law Journal.”

“As a result of this meeting,” Mr. Griswold said, “the four journals now publish The Bluebook jointly and share the revenues; but virtually all the editorial work is still done at Harvard, which earns the largest share of the income.”

The new article, which will be published in The Minnesota Law Review after editors there finish making sure the citations in it follow proper Bluebook conventions, tells a different story. The project started at Yale, it says, but for a long time Harvard kept all the money.

Mr. Shapiro and Ms. Krishnaswami trace the origins of The Bluebook to an eight-page booklet prepared in 1920 by Karl N. Llewellyn, who was editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal and would become an enormously influential law professor. A page of the booklet, possibly written with a colleague, set out a few sensible citation conventions, illustrating them with fake examples.

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The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.”

A decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court should be cited this way, it said: “Jones v. Smith (1911) 92 Conn. 34, 3 Atl. 56.” That example appeared again in a little pamphlet The Yale Law Journal distributed the next year called “Abbreviations and Form of Citation.” Both documents had blue covers, perhaps because that is Yale’s school color.

There is a 1922 document in Harvard’s files called “Instructions for Editorial Work” that Mr. Griswold said was the basis for The Bluebook, first published in 1926. But there is vanishingly little overlap between the Harvard document and the first Bluebook. On the other hand, the exact Connecticut Supreme Court citation and similar specific examples, as well as a great deal of other material, had somehow migrated from Yale into The Bluebook.

A 1925 report from the president of The Harvard Law Review seemed to confirm Yale’s presence at the creation. “A year ago,” he wrote, “The Yale Law Journal started a movement for a uniform mode of citation.”

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Starting in 1934, when the 48-page fourth edition was published, The Bluebook bore a copyright notice listing all four law schools as its owners.

It is a good business. The new article says “it is likely that Bluebook revenues are now in the millions of dollars.”

But for half a century, Harvard quietly kept the revenues for itself. In the summer of 1973, though, several editors of The Harvard Law Review disclosed the fact to Joan G. Wexler, an editor of The Yale Law Journal, over lunch while they were all summer associates at a San Francisco law firm.

“They were yakking it up about how they had all this money,” Ms. Wexler, who went on to become dean of the Brooklyn Law School, said the other day. “And I’m thinking, ‘Money? Where do they get all this money?’ It came up that they were getting all of the revenues from The Bluebook.”

She returned to New Haven, consulted copyright experts and, along with editors from the other law reviews, confronted their Harvard counterparts. “It took a while to strike a deal,” Ms. Wexler said. “I’m sure this little group at lunch was very sad they ever said a word to me.”

Ms. Wexler said she did not recall how much money Harvard returned or the precise split going forward.

According to a footnote to a 1976 review of the 200-page 12th edition of The Bluebook in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard had been “illegally keeping all profits from the first eleven editions, estimated to total $20,000 per year.” The new arrangement, the review said, “provides Harvard with only twice the profits of each of the other schools in return for continued production and distribution services.”

Current editors declined to discuss current revenues and how they are shared. Asked for their general reactions to the new article, the top editors of the four law reviews behind The Bluebook responded with a joint statement. “Whatever the ancient history might be, today we’re doing all we can to be the best possible stewards of a resource used by so many throughout the legal world,” the statement said.

The new article ends on a sheepish note.

“Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,” it says. “Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2015, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Yale Finds Error in Legal Stylebook: Contrary to Claim, Harvard Didn’t Create It. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe